Odoo Installation

While I’ve been using Ultimate Client Manager to track leads and handle accounting for my consulting, I’ve hit the point that I need something with Android integration for not only me, but hopefully other consultants as well. I decided to give Odoo (formerly OpenERP) a try. Because it’s not as simple as uploading PHP files and creating a MySQL database and easily install on my VestaCP host, I opted to get a new VPS to dedicate to it.

While I absolutely love Linode for my normal VPS needs, I really needed something with a lower price tag. I found a $60/year offer for ChigagoVPS and quickly signed up to give it a whirl (and once I’ve had it running a month or two I’ll also write up a ChicagoVPS review). My only recommendation is you make sure to have at least 1 GB RAM, because with anything less you may find Odoo crawling along, or even stopping.

After doing plenty of Googling around, I didn’t find any good installation instructions to install from a repository. Nearly everything wanted me to check out Odoo from git and compile it myself, which just isn’t my thing. So, after finding they had a nightly Debian/Ubuntu repo, I opted to just publish the rather simple set of instructions to get Odoo running quickly.

Everything here assumes you’re installing on Ubuntu 14.04 with no additional packages and dedicated to Odoo. A couple of the commands were taken from Odoo’s site.

After running the above commands, it should be up and running and waiting for you to configure the database. You’ll want to point your browser to the IP or domain of your Ubuntu server, port 8069, and configure it.

http://<hostname or ip>:8069

After you’re through the initial (and EASY) setup you’ll be ready to install the Odoo modules.

Install Monit

Even on the best machine you may find services randomly stop for whatever reason. Monit is an excellent tool that will make sure they’re running, and if they’re not, will start them again. Any production machine needs monit, and it’s easy to setup.

Install monit:

apt-get install monit

Super basic configuration:

nano /etc/monit/monitrc

Make sure you have a valid email on this line and make sure not commented out:

set alert your@email.com # receive all alerts
CTRL+O
CTRL+X

Put the appropriate files in /etc/monit/conf.d/ or just do the following: